Now Levin is grilling a Goldman employee as to why they continued to sell a deal that the head of the division had described as “a shitty deal”. The banker is trying to explain that he’s a salesman, not a fiduciary, with little success. What I want to know is–didn’t these guys learn a damn thing from the show trials of the last decade? These are the kinds of things that should never, ever be committed to any form that can be subpoena’d by a committee.

So the key issues in this incident in our public life are (a) that Goldman too fully documented its business practices (that’s the legal eagle McArdle at work); (b) that the key wrong here is being called to account for those business practices, not any acts by the witness or his employer (here’s McArdle’s keenly honed sense of right and wrong firing); and (c) that the injustice of asking for justification for said business practices, and the implication that these might have been less than savory, is of the same rank odor as these. (And here we see the fine McArdle understanding of the lessons of the past in all its glory.)

Update: Per Downpuppy’s comments below — yes, McArdle qualifies the phrase “show trial” with “of the last decade,” meaning, I guess, something to do with Enron or the like. But the

This is, of course, standard operating procedure for the Big Lie right. In case you hadn’t noticed, there is a systematic rhetorical trope of delegitimizing the acts of the Obama administration and the current Democratic Party -led Congress in particular, and the idea of government action in general. To McArdle, the notion that any Congress should interrogate the “free” market is a travesty; and though McArdle masks some of her partisanship under a veneer of the faux libertarian’s “pox on both their houses” rhetoric, she and her many fellow travelers frame the acts of this particular administration as being distinctively odious, specially intrusive and in violation of ideas of liberty to a degree unprecedented in American politics.

And really — even for the relentlessly sloppy and supericial McArdle, this is a terribly weak effort. Questioning by a Senator with full advice of counsel and a few billion dollars behind you is of the same order as one of Stalin’s court cases, from which the only exit could be a bullet to the brain? The moral midgetry required to make the comparison is breath taking — and illustrative.

Update: Per Downpuppy’s comments below — yes, McArdle qualifies the phrase “show trial” with “of the last decade,” meaning, I guess, something to do with Enron or the like.

But the point I’m trying to get across here, expressed perhaps a little too elliptically above, is that the use of an term like “show trial,” even qualified, is of a piece with a broader rhetorical move on the seditious right to conflate, say, a mild, originally conservative-supported health care reform with a vast government overreach of a scale Stalin or Hitler would recognize. There is a kind of dual outrage inflation/sense or judgment dulling that comes with the use of words like statism, or over reach, or socialism or fascism — or show trials, with all the 20th century baggage that such an epithet evokes.

In this context, besides being incoherent (what does she have in mind as a show trial of 2001-2010 decade? I really got nuthin, unless she truly does believe that Ken Lay and Andy Fastow are martyrs on the altar of Ms.Rand) McArdle’s attempt to qualify her use of the loaded “show trial” is merely a fig leaf, really a tell: that she has to modify her rhetoric here strongly suggest that she knows just how noxious it really is.